First a bit of nomenclature: "tracking" means the recording of your way. You get raw data of where you travelled. Later you can (manually) convert this pile of coordinates into vectors and tag them, e.g. as street, highway, river and so on. Then you can use this data to draw a map. That's basically how the http://www.openstreetmap.org (OSM) project works.

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First a bit of nomenclature: "tracking" means the recording of your way. You get raw data of where you travelled. Later you can (manually) convert this pile of coordinates into vectors and tag them, e.g. as street, highway, river and so on. Then you can use this data to draw a map. That's basically how the http://www.openstreepmap.org (OSM) project works.

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The Neo1973 has some nice hardware properties for this purpose:

The Neo1973 has some nice hardware properties for this purpose:

Latest revision as of 22:11, 21 September 2008

Wishes warning! This article or section documents one or more OpenMoko Wish List items, the features described here may or may not be implemented in the future.

Contents

First a bit of nomenclature: "tracking" means the recording of your way. You get raw data of where you travelled. Later you can (manually) convert this pile of coordinates into vectors and tag them, e.g. as street, highway, river and so on. Then you can use this data to draw a map. That's basically how the http://www.openstreetmap.org (OSM) project works.

There are some nice, relatively cheap trackers out there like the WBT201 that are usable with OSM. However, this device has no input method. So if you want to mark a street crossing, you can just write down the time. Or stay for 1 minute put, in the hope to find this information later in your data.

In the Neo1973, you could press a "record" button and speak "Kaiserstraße, Ecke Müllergasse" into the microphone. This recording could then be compressed (e.g. with speex) and saved, as an additional attribute.

The LCD could not only display the current longitute, latitude and the usual things that GPS devices display, it could also display of your previous trackings. Althought the display is very small, it's obviously much better than a display-less GPS tracker.

The build-in touchscreen, with the proper software, would even allow one to pre-process the data in some way, e.g. by selecting points, convert them into vectors, put tags on them. Selecting objects (points, vectors) by touchscreen is much better than just selecting them by keyboard.

GPS Tracker and Editor

First a bit of nomenclature: "tracking" means the recording of your way. You get raw data of where you travelled. Later you can (manually) convert this pile of coordinates into vectors and tag them, e.g. as street, highway, river and so on. Then you can use this data to draw a map. That's basically how the http://www.openstreepmap.org (OSM) project works.

The Neo1973 has some nice hardware properties for this purpose:

GPS receiver

GSM/GPRS

Microphone, Keyboard

LCD

Touchscreen

Here are some ideas to make use of those hardware things.

GPS receiver

Now that is easy. Obviously the job of the GPS receiver is to give us coordinates.

GSM/GPRS

In many european countries you can get correction coordinates to make your GPS signal better. That way you have a DGPS.

Microphone, Keyboard

There are some nice, relatively cheap trackers out there like the WBT201 that are usable with OSM. However, this device has no input method. So if you want to mark a street crossing, you can just write down the time. Or stay for 1 minute put, in the hope to find this information later in your data.

In the Neo1973, you could press a "record" button and speak "Kaiserstraße, Ecke Müllergasse" into the microphone. This recording could then be compressed (e.g. with speex) and saved, as an additional attribute.

LCD

The LCD could not only display the current longitute, latitude and the usual things that GPS devices display, it could also display of your previous trackings. Althought the display is very small, it's obviously much better than a display-less GPS tracker.

Touchscreen

The build-in touchscreen, with the proper software, would even allow one to pre-process the data in some way, e.g. by selecting points, convert them into vectors, put tags on them. Selecting objects (points, vectors) by touchscreen is much better than just selecting them by keyboard.